![]() ![]() ![]() Khalid, 32, was born and raised in Staten Island, which surely accounts for the vividness and believability of that setting. In terms of earthly real estate, the two poles are the Occident Street Mosque in Staten Island, New York, and the futuristic, "linear" city of HADITH (its name appears only in capitals) in Saudi. But it locates the story in that marginal zone between utopian dream and what the book's human characters might identify as grim, everyday reality. The reference is to a sinister Saudi Arabian enterprise that spawns and then re-assembles the book's main characters, a trio of adoptees. Deep within that is a line that could stand as a motto for the book: "We lied about what we knew and told them the truth about what we didn't." ![]() Several layers deep in it is a letter from a Mohammed Ali (not the boxer). It's brilliantly, breathlessly, but disappointingly baffling. Even in as genre-free a landscape as that, Zain Khalid's much-anticipated first novel, "Brother Alive" (Grove Press), stakes out new territory. "Uncategorizable" is the flavor of the month in gay literary fiction. ![]()
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